Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Supported by

Bill Gates and Creative Capitalism

By Nicholas D. Kristof June 27, 2008 3:08 pmJune 27, 2008 3:08 pm

This is Bill Gates’ last day on the job as a software tycoon. Beginning Monday, he will devote himself primarily to his job not at Microsoft but at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working on public health and other issues.

Bill and Melinda Gates are among the best things that have happened to Africa, and not just because of the sums of money that they have donated. Just as important, they have brought a serious business mindset to philanthropy and development, and an expectation that “do-gooders” should be cost-effective and rely on metrics to prove their performance. Gates also changed what is cool in philanthropy; it used to be considered appropriate to donate to art museums and the opera, in effect benefiting other disproportionately privileged people, while now there is an increasing focus on fighting global poverty.

Early this year in Davos, Gates gave a speech calling for “creative capitalism” to address the needs of the very poor, who often slip through the cracks as it is. Now Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke have set up a website to discuss the idea, with the aim of producing a book based in part on the blog comments.

Bill Easterly and others have posted some interesting comments on the blog. For my part, I think some people misread Gates. My sense is that he’s trying to find ways to tweak capitalism so that it’s power is unleashed so as to help the poor, rather than to force corporations to “do good.” For example, we now know that when government stipends for children are paid to fathers, the money often goes to beer; if the stipends are paid to mothers, the money is more likely to pay the child’s school fees. Thus, let’s encourage other countries to emulate Mexico and pay stipends to mothers. Likewise, if the poor get legal title to their land, the credit system will work much more efficiently and give them a chance to finance businesses. And so on….in that sense of lubricating capitalist institutions so that they operate more efficiently and bolster the public good, creative capitalism makes tremendous sense.

As you point out, “philanthropy” mostly used to prop up the art market in rich countries, and, ultimately, by representing as extremely precious what the rich owned the most of, “philanthropy” art giving to museums made the rich even richer. In other words, old fashion philanthropy was mostly a self glorifying scam.

Inasmuch as it hurts me to say that, the Gates are somehow on the right track, in their little woods. But as Melinda herself pointed out somewhere, their money is puny when compared to governmental spending. A bit like venture capitalists, they just can have a big effect by dumping what is relatively a lot of money on relatively small, clever projects. The Gates foundation cannot spend more than at most a billion or two a year, lest it disappears.

The real question is whether there are other scams presented as philanthropy that are actually exploitation schemes. An obvious one is the huge agricultural subsidies of Europe and the USA for their own producers (the ones with the votes). According to the G21 group of countries, and the G7 themselves, those subsidies amount to $300 billion, every single year. This prevents the poorest to have jobs and be anything but beggars. $300 billion dollars would change completely the daily lives of hundreds of millions of peasants and their dependents. It would dwarf both the Gates foundation and all the “aid” from rich states to the poorest.

Capitalism can be tweaked, as you said. But ultimately the ‘free market’ is not free at all: it plays in the arena set up by governmentalism. Zimbabwe (“Rhodesia”) used to be one the richest countries in Africa, but now it’s in ruins because the leadership has gone crazy. The same occurred, to some extent, in Guinea, or Algeria, or Rwanda, to quote only a few. That is why correct oversight by the United Nations and its agents and surrogates, animated by the correct philosophy, backed up by military power, is more important than believing in the father Christmas of micro capitalism unleashed.

Bill Gates has always tapped into the vein of Middle America… the part of America that’s the laziest, but also the most important and the most able to change the country then world.

I also think that he didn’t want the constant, daily competition with Steve Jobs. This is his way of rising above money and business to actually help change the world for the better.

I love how he feels the obligation to help the poor and less fortunate. Everyone should feel that obligation, regardless of personal wealth, although a fortune helps to travel, learn, donate and evoke positive change.

The best ideas Bill and Melinda talk about are changing infrastructure in these countries. THAT’s the concern. You have to change the entire policy and the way it’s done. Or, in most poor African countries, you have to develop a system… actually create infrastructure.

To me, Bill Gates is a great man. He had a vision to bring a computer to every household and he DID it. Of course, the conditions have to be right but he knew when the conditions were right.

In his later years he decided to dedicated himself to efficient spending of the billions he has earned and has, basically, no other use for.

Capitalism here, capitalism there. Completely empty words. I know from a personal experience what ‘socialism’ (the Communist version) is. A total disaster. I have no idea why people even talk about ‘capitalism’. It is the only natural thing we can do – with many blemishes. Some rich people go bananas with their money but with tens of billions that is not even possible.

I just wish Gates the best – he may or may not succeed to have a major impact on the world other than putting PCs in our houses but, certainly, he will not hurt anyone.

As the comment above says: kudos to him and his family and other people like him – Warren Buffet is just one of them.

– For example, we now know that when government stipends for children are paid to fathers, the money often goes to beer; if the stipends are paid to mothers, the money is more likely to pay the child’s school fee. –

However, if the stipends are paid to mothers, the money may be paying the boyfriend’s beer and ends up with an abused child. Who knows. The solution is education, education, and education. But in some areas, education must include “adult education – how to be a responsible person, parent, and citizen”. And if that’s the case, I wonder why education does not include the course “how to be a responsible person, parent, and citizen” to start with.

So often, we think of education as schooling. Bill Gates also criticizes the American high schools for not performing well. Does he realize even in each of the same school and class, some students do better then others? Why is that so? If we do a survey we’ll find the key differences in parents.

“The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.”

“Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.”

“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.”

One of my medical school classmates works with Mr. Gates on his efforts to curb infectious diseases in the Third World. I applaud their efforts- she may well save more lives than all the rest of us in the Class of 1982 put together- but I wonder if all of their efforts will be to no avail. The African continent and people seem to be able to absorb vast amounts of attention, effort, and money, all in search of solutions to their manifold problems- and yet things don’t get any better. They get worse. Good luck, Bill- you’ll need it.

It is nice that Bill Gates is helping the poor. Praise however should not be given for his generosity. He got vast amounts of money by charging, in true capitalist fashion, as much as he could for his products using the power of his monopoly, which the courts both in USA and Europe found illegal. So these ill gotten gains are really the result of overcharging you and all his other customers who had no choice. In Britain the customers suffered most as he charged at the rate of £=$ when the going rate varied between £=1.7$ and £=2$. The result is that praise for Bill’s actions is very muted here.

vaccinating most of the poor is not creative, it is like the British school system we inherited from 200+ years ago.

A school. A jail. A hospital. Each of these institutions is the same. On the surface they may look different, but each one of them is a place that no one wants to be in [if we are authentic to our inner self or know we could be dead tomorrow], and each one of them is a product of your thinking that “Fix them. They aren’t alright the way they are” [thus fear, judgment and condemnation] is a reasonable philosophy [point-of-view].

Schools, jails, and hospitals are like factories that make little statues out of clay. You put something in a mold, press it, and something different comes out. What you tell yourselves is that you send children to school to get an education, send criminals to jail to get rehabilitated, and send the sick to hospitals to get well. But you know that that rarely happens. And that rarely happens not because you do not have enough funding for schools, enough cells for criminals, enough good doctors for your hospitals. That rarely happens because your core [basic] idea is wrong. You cannot change people in the same way that you mold clay. And the sooner you realize this, the sooner you can begin to create centers of learning and transformation that come not from imposing ideas on people as if they were lumps of clay, but from evoking the innate wisdom in people… For every single human being is a special creation… an immortal soul dancing for a brief time in the realms of physicality, the co-creator of its own unique destiny.

I am 68 years old and a returning Peace Corps Volunteer who spent 2 1/2 years in a small village in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. I was the only white person and lived as the villagers with no electricity and fetched my water at a distance. I saw it all, from AIDS to abuse, from primative farming to many orphans wanting an education but no money for school fees. The villagers treated me with great respect.

I wrote many grants through Peace Corps and built a dispensary, a library with a new classroom, vaccinated chickens for New Castle disease, taught English and helped the women with income generation projects. Those 2 1/2 years were the best of my life.

Since arriving back in the U.S. in January, I started fund-raising in March to build an orphanage in my little village of 1,450 people.
Every week people are dying, mostly of AIDS. We only have a primary school with 420 students of which 116 are orphans. I need $60,000 American dollars by Sept. 28th., 2008 when I return to Tanzania to start the orphanage. There is a woman in Little Rock, Ar. that will match the $60,000 if I meet the goal. To date I have raised $39,000, still short the $21,000.

When I return to Tanzania, I will not have the cushion of Peace Corps. I will be on my own.

My question is; Would Bill Gates help me? I do not have his address. I am sure he receives hundreds of requests daily, but building this orphanage is my passion, my mission. I do need help.

I have been speaking at churches, groups and clubs. I give a Power-point presentation that is approx. 30 minutes long.

I believe Bill Gates to be a great humanitarian. Yes, we can always find fault with him, but I have found Americans to be very generous. Mr. Gates is undoubtably one of the most generous.

Mr. Bill gate have done so much and i think God has really used him to help the les priviledge ones, Thank God for creating a man like bill gate. I think i need to write him to encourage him to continue the good work he’s doing. please let me know if yo have bill gate’s private email address.

Warm Regards:
Chris.

What's Next

About Nicholas Kristof

This blog expands on Nicholas Kristof’s twice-weekly columns, sharing thoughts that shape the writing but don’t always make it into the 800-word text. It’s also the place where readers make their voices heard.